About this BP Oil Spill

Just some random thoughts since this will be in the news for the next 5 years.

First of all, it’s not a spill. A busted pipe, a gusher, a leak maybe but not a spill. When a water pipe in your house breaks do you call the plumber and say “We’ve got a spill”? No. Nothing has been spilled, it just sounds better in the news.

Second the mess could be contained and cleaned up for a small fraction of the cost that someone is going to pay. The use of natural bacteria and grasses and other plant life can soak up and eat up this mess easily. It’s done all the time in other countries. The problem here it’s a US mess being handled by a corporation, and being overseen by a government that has already admitted they don’t know how or what to do. Other nations handle this type of thing quickly and relatively inexpensively. Trouble here is when this sort of thing happens we just must involve every corporate engineer, chemical company, etc to insure that everyone gets to make a huge pile of money. There’s no way BP is going to lose any money. Their costs will come back to them in expenses passed on to the government and the consumer. Don’t think BP execs are going to have to start driving Kia’s to work because they can’t afford their luxury cars. It will make no difference. They will make it SOUND like it makes a difference, but it won’t. In the meantime this whole mess is a huge money windfall for dozens of companies and hundreds if not thousands of people.

Third, this whole mess is the result of the greenies — the environmentalists — getting what they demanded. We could have been tapping this oil from locations much closer to shore. But the Green Team insisted we drill way out in the ocean to prevent oil getting to shore should something like this happen. Well, it happened. The oil is here. And because we’re forced to drill way off shore, it’s 5,000 feet down where no human can get to it. Were they drilling in 500 feet of water divers could have got to this easily and taken care of it quickly. But noooo, we had to drill in 5,000 feet of water because having it inaccessible is better!

UPDATE: I just heard on the news that this “spill” will cost the economy somewhere between 10 and 200 billion dollars (all depending on which news report you read). Really? REALLY? Exactly where it the economy going to spend those 200 billion dollars? Oh, I know! It’s going to be spent on salaries, materials, transportation, communications and a myriad of other things that cost money. The mess will cost jobs, the mess will create jobs. it’s just like when someone rants about the cost of war. Sure war costs money, that’s because it’s great business. Think for just 60 seconds about all the jobs that rely on war. My Son once worked in a machine shop where they made one little part for a gun on a tank. He earned a good wage there. That small shop that employed a dozen or so workers needed it’s military contracts to survive. Think how many individual parts there are in one tank. How many jobs are needed to make all those parts? That 200 billion dollars that this “spill” will cost is not money thrown into the sea to appease King Neptune, it’s money paid to people to clean up this mess. A long chain of people and companies from small shops like the one my Son worked in to huge plants. What this is going to really do is dump 200 billion dollars INTO the economy, much of it coming from BP’s tightly knotted purse strings and more flowing freely from a government that is really hoping to look like the Lone Ranger coming to the rescue. Look at the big picture, people.